Why you need technical SEO for a great online strategy - bSEO April 2023

By looking at concrete examples of how real people address real issues through technical SEO today, Rebecca will show that SEOs from key industries and diverse companies have built technical SEO into their strategy — and why they've done it. You'll walk away with an overview of the world of technical SEO today, and a demonstration of how it is a critical part of solutions implemented as part of an organic growth or acquisition strategy.

Talk given at BrightonSEO in April 2023
https://www.oncrawl.com

Transcript

1. Why you need technical SEO to build a great online strategy https://speakerdeck.com/rebberbel @RebBerbel Rebecca Berbel ONCRAWL
2. @RebBerbel “Technical SEO doesn't always occupy the place it should in our priorities. It's what I end up spending the largest portion of my time on.” — Rémi Nestasio
3. @RebBerbel Perspective
4. @RebBerbel technical stuff The that we do to the technical parts of a website, for SEO purposes
5. @RebBerbel technical stuff The that we do to the technical parts of a website, for SEO purposes
6. @RebBerbel technical stuff The that we do to the technical parts of a website, for SEO purposes
7. @RebBerbel E-com m erce Classifieds & Catalogs New s O ther Technical SEO projects
8. @RebBerbel E-com m erce Classifieds & Catalogs New s O ther Technical SEO projects Internal links Evangelization Crawl /Indexing Testing, Monitoring, QA Migrations Internationalization Speed / CWV Keywords & Entities UX & Accessibility Other
9. @RebBerbel 53,620,097 Sites with LOTS of pages
10. @RebBerbel "You have to think technical SEO when you have high volumes of pages: your site relies on automated solutions and everything needs to be handled algorithmically." — Hervé Le Turdu
11. @RebBerbel Tech stacks …if they are a little complex.
12. @RebBerbel "The technology behind this site is 15 years old, and it can take [a drawn-out procedure] to change any element." — Natalia Witczyk
13. @RebBerbel Structure Here's what I mean by structure.
14. @RebBerbel "It brings enormous SEO value to a website to create a structure and ensure it stays in place. New pages need to also be incorporated with links to and from other pages." — Omi Sido
15. @RebBerbel E-commerce Oh, yeah, of course!
16. @RebBerbel Automation Often to address scalability issues
17. @RebBerbel Collaboration Cross-team work is a core component of tech SEO.
18. @RebBerbel “We have a multidisciplinary team — our SEO team is actually part of our product IT team.” — Antonio Lasaga
19. @RebBerbel “I feel like I'm pitching a project, not a ticket.” — Anett Pohl
20. @RebBerbel Evangelization Spreading awareness, gaining buy-in, and sharing ownership
21. @RebBerbel "You as a technical SEO can help in defining focus topics and contribute in a cross-functional team." — Nicolas Bergmann
22. @RebBerbel “Technical SEO looks really simple until you get into it, and then in practice it's another story. [...] It's never critical until it really is.” — Antoine Eripret
23. @RebBerbel Address the effects of core updates Some types of sites are more susceptible than others
24. @RebBerbel Crawl Index Rank (Is this another definition of tech SEO? Or of how search works?
25. @RebBerbel "A lot of this is about crawling. Obviously linking and navigation is going to play a big part in how Google crawls our sites and understands our content. — Simon Glanville
26. @RebBerbel Assessing and shaping what is indexed
27. @RebBerbel Crawlability and crawl management
28. @RebBerbel "We're really interested in using logs to find points of user friction and study both performance and UX. [Our technical SEO team] balances perfecting the site's UX and perfecting it for Google. — Melissa Wong
29. @RebBerbel New website technologies Don't let them break your SEO
30. @RebBerbel Monitoring
31. @RebBerbel New search capabilities Leverage them (before your competitors do)
32. @RebBerbel From keywords to entities Semantic search: I talked about this last BrightonSEO ;)
33. @RebBerbel "We've found that Discover is powered by links and entities more than keywords; [our performance improves] when we reinforce the correlation between links and recognized entities." — Nicolas Bergmann
34. @RebBerbel Internationalization
35. @RebBerbel "We measured a fast and positive impact with hreflang tagging." — Damien Robert
36. @RebBerbel "Must-have" projects
37. @RebBerbel “The subjects I'd say are "must haves" can change over time.” — Can Menteş
38. @RebBerbel Integrating non-SEO metrics Content Business UX
39. @RebBerbel Internal Linking
40. @RebBerbel Page performance
41. @RebBerbel "My dev team is obsessed with page speed." — Can Menteş
42. @RebBerbel "Developers believe [CWV] are important, so it offers an access to their backlog." — Hervé Le Turdu
43. @RebBerbel What do these projects in common have ?
44. @RebBerbel "You need a strong foundation to be able to build on it. Technical SEO is the core of SEO." — Mustafa Elnager
45. @RebBerbel This is all beginning to strategy sound like
46. @RebBerbel “Corona seemed to make technical SEO more important: sites wanted generalist SEO but they realized the benefits they needed were from technical SEO.” — Emilia Gjorgjevska
47. @RebBerbel So what should we do about it ?
48. @RebBerbel Dedicate dev time to SEO Allocate the right resources (Prioritize) Get the basics right Use the right tools
49. @RebBerbel Allocate the right resources (Prioritize)
50. @RebBerbel Dedicate dev time to SEO Dedicate dev time to SEO
51. @RebBerbel "There's a technical element to SEO in general, but it can get way more complicated: we might not be talking about just inserting JSON code for an entity, but maybe recognizing entities with AI first." — Roxana Stingu
52. @RebBerbel Get the basics right
53. @RebBerbel Use the right tools
54. @RebBerbel "Manual monitoring at scale is impossible. I need crawl alerting and dashboards that allow me to be proactive and vigilant." — Madeline Pinthon
55. @RebBerbel "Sometimes we spend more time fixing regressions than creating progress through pure technical SEO. A tool like Oncrawl with its crawl comparison features helps a lot with non-regression checks." — Rémi Nestasio
56. @RebBerbel Drive increased ROI and business success with your website Scale your audits, investigations, monitoring, and evangelization Capture complete search engine and organic session behavior Blend data across diverse data sources for deep and revealing analyses Automatiser, personnaliser et connecter avec d'autres briques de votre workflow SEO ou BI Industry-leading Technical SEO Data for Competitive Websites www.oncrawl.com
57. @RebBerbel Anett Pohl Antoine Eripret Antonio Lasaga Can Menteş Damien Robert Emilia Gjorgjevska Hervé Le Turdu Madeline Pinthon Melissa Wong Mustafa Elnager Natalia Witczyk Nicolas Bergmann Omi Sido Roxana Stingu Rémi Nestasio Simon Glanville
58. @RebBerbel Come see me at the Oncrawl booth to talk about technical SEO! Thank you!